The New York Times’ multimedia story “Snowfall” was hailed by many both as a model for digital storytelling and an example of what The Times, at its best, had to offer in today’s tumultuous and “disruptive” media landscape. The paper of record has now applied the Snowfall approach to native advertising in conjunction with the Netflix TV show “Orange is the New Black." Far from a bluntly promotional piece, “Women Inmates: Why the Male Model Doesn’t Work,” is real journalism focused on women in prison replete with video and infographics. Is it the model for what so-called “native advertising” should be? Quite possibly!

Would you like a 94% increase in views of your content? Would you like your retweets to increase 150%? Well, that is the impact that adding relevant images to your content can have (at least according to one study). The folks over at Buffer decided to take these stats to heart and add more visual content to their blog. In this post, they share they lessons they’ve learned and provide insight on everything from the Golden Mean to tools marketers can use to produce great visual content.

Just about anyone who’s ever learned how to use Photoshop has probably manipulated a photograph taken by John Knoll of his future wife, Jennifer, in Bora Bora. This article gives you a history of that image and with it a history of Photoshop, which began as a software application developed by Knoll’s brother.

Last week, we shared some visualizations of data taken from Boston’s MBTA system. This week, courtesy of the US Census Bureau, we show you how the “mean center of population” has moved West as the United States has grown. What is the “mean center of population”? According to the folks at the Census, it is “the point at which an imaginary, flat, weightless, and rigid map of the United States would balance if weights of identical value were placed on it so that each weight represented the location of one person on Census Day (April 1).” Who knew?

As everyone knows, the "sharing economy" is growing with services like Airbnb, UberX, and TaskRabbit enabling people to rent things from rooms in their home to their free time. Still, there are many untapped sharing opportunities out there, as David Pogue, columnist for Yahoo Tech and Scientific American points out in this article. The most promising: NeighborDisk, which would allow every hoarder of DVDs to transform their stacks of discs from dust magnets into a friendly neighborhood RedBox!